macrumors 6502

When I dropped the RAW DSLR footage (no color correction or anything) and just rendered the frames the CUDA flat out beat OpenCL.

However, when I run something like "warp stabilization" the times between the 2 are fairly similar to analyze/stabilize the clip.

Is this normal?

EDIT: After applying "warp" onto a clip CUDA/OpenCL can play it back without render (yellow bar) but when I switch to "software" then thats where I get the red render bar with somewhat choppy playback.

- "OpenCL" is a versatile programming language that can use render farms with many CPUs to render stuff. It can also directly attach to the CUDA interface of your GPGPU and do calculations on AMD (and other) graphic chips.

This means:

1. In your case, OpenCL will use the same graphics chip as CUDA, but via an extra interface. That's why it will always be slower than CUDA. CUDA is the way to go if you have any graphics or visual calculations going on and if you have an nVIDIA chip in your computer.

2. If you have a render farm of many CPUs or a strong AMD graphics chip, "OpenCL" is the best option.

3. For some tasks (like only export with everything pre-rendered), "Software" might actually be faster. But almost everything that has to do with video and especially visual effects is very well optimized on GPGPUs, so this will rarely be the case.

This is all very general and unspecific because I don't know your hardware and have never used CS6, but I know the programming side of this. I hope this helps anyways.

macrumors 6502a

So I guess my main question is what is the difference between the 3 options?

Click to expand...

The first is using your laptop's CPU. The second 2 are using your laptop's GPU.

Support for OpenCL and nVidia GPUs is weak at this point in time. The code is there (obviously) but it's not nearly as well-developed as nVidia's own CUDA APIs are. Further, CS6 is the first time that Adobe has attempted to use OpenCL APIs; they've been focused on the CUDA stuff for quite some time. So it's reasonable to expect that once the drivers are more polished AND Adobe gets more OpenCL experience under their belts, that things will speed up a bit.

thread startermacrumors 6502

- "OpenCL" is a versatile programming language that can use render farms with many CPUs to render stuff. It can also directly attach to the CUDA interface of your GPGPU and do calculations on AMD (and other) graphic chips.

This means:

1. In your case, OpenCL will use the same graphics chip as CUDA, but via an extra interface. That's why it will always be slower than CUDA. CUDA is the way to go if you have any graphics or visual calculations going on and if you have an nVIDIA chip in your computer.

2. If you have a render farm of many CPUs or a strong AMD graphics chip, "OpenCL" is the best option.

3. For some tasks (like only export with everything pre-rendered), "Software" might actually be faster. But almost everything that has to do with video and especially visual effects is very well optimized on GPGPUs, so this will rarely be the case.

This is all very general and unspecific because I don't know your hardware and have never used CS6, but I know the programming side of this. I hope this helps anyways.

Click to expand...

No this helped out big time! I just thought that OpenCL was also using the CPU so I was puzzled at how it was able to match up w/ the GPU. But now I understand the general aspect of it.

The first is using your laptop's CPU. The second 2 are using your laptop's GPU.

Support for OpenCL and nVidia GPUs is weak at this point in time. The code is there (obviously) but it's not nearly as well-developed as nVidia's own CUDA APIs are. Further, CS6 is the first time that Adobe has attempted to use OpenCL APIs; they've been focused on the CUDA stuff for quite some time. So it's reasonable to expect that once the drivers are more polished AND Adobe gets more OpenCL experience under their belts, that things will speed up a bit.

jas

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I thought that it was the case as to why CUDA was faster but as you said now that they've got OpenCL under the belt they should be able to improve upon it via updates and future installments.

macrumors 68020

No this helped out big time! I just thought that OpenCL was also using the CPU so I was puzzled at how it was able to match up w/ the GPU. But now I understand the general aspect of it.

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Thanks for the reply. I thought that it was the case as to why CUDA was faster but as you said now that they've got OpenCL under the belt they should be able to improve upon it via updates and future installments.

Click to expand...

Yeah, it'll only take time. Adobe has a lot more development under its belt using the CUDA platform. OpenCL is still relatively new...

And this is a good thing. A lot of Mac Pro users are stuck with cards (ATI/AMD) that can't use CUDA at all.

macrumors newbie

How would you suggest adding external power to support the video card??

I was just rendering a video, and realized that my system already seems maxed out with its power demands.

Right now I have 4 internal hard drives, a Mercury Accelsior, and have the budget to buy the better card for $700, though I was concerned about Power; I would have waited for our purchase though motivated for a boost in productivity!

I went looking on your website forum, but there wasn't any noticeable answers (perhaps I may not looked hard enough).

I am willing to buy another power supply, for external use, anyone know of options?

macrumors regular

Cuda is the way to go at the moment with cs6. But it's not the be all and end all. I can't remember where I read it , but it was the adobe people discussing the benefits of offloading work to the gpu and that in some cases, leaving the calculations on the CPU or the on-die integrated gpu was faster instead of offloading it to a discrete gpu card ... Cause you had to move the data across the bus to the card which took time. For that reason, you'll not see every filter effect cuda enabled so to speak as its not worth it.

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